THIRD CONTINGENT ARRIVES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 248, 29 March 1915, Page 7

THIRD CONTINGENT ARRIVES.

TRAINING-OF FIRST FORCES

OVER.

Cairo, March 18. The season here is already full spring. The fruit blossom is out, and new green is covering ( ull the trees. Flies are becoming pestilential, and occasionally fierce hot winds from the desert bring down clouds of sand, lasting a day or two, and settling like a fog over all the landscape.

Through all this, the troops have worked well. The. hardest part of training is now over. Probably the stillest period was for about a fortnight before the Turkish attack on the canal, when the troops were working solidly in the: desert from eight o'clock to five every week day. Since then, the authorities, in order to keep the men fresh, instituted one whole holiday every week, besides half on Sundays. Hard work in the dust naturally tells on the health of a proportion of the, men, but this incident of training is absolutely unavoidable and willingly incurred. Willingness is the chief virtue of these Australian troops. British and French officers who watch them never fail to remark on this.

Those who liave fallen victims lo pneumonia, which is always -tin; prevalent complaint amongst' soldiers in Egypt, have died as truly in the somen of their eountrv as anv who die on the balllefield.

All Egyptian paper publishes a statement that altogether seven soldiers have fallen down the Pramids of Cheops, of whom four were killed, and one. was sent back to Australia with spinal injuries. As a result I may state that the fast is that one soldier has died through a fall on the Pyramid. He was a territorial. One Australian injured his spina. No otlier casualties on the Pyramids arc known of by the authorities. The third contingent has arrived, and is now in camp, after a splendid voyage, j which was quite uneventful. There was not one single rough any. The horses are splendid.

One transport one day picked up a wireless message, but it turned out to be from a consort. She was asking for Epsom salts, ' t